SteamGifts - Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

Yesterday

SteamGifts launched June 5th, 2011, originally by invitation only. I remember Reddit helped seed the community day one with a few thousand members, and news quickly spread to many of the other great gaming communities that still choose to use SG to this day. It was a fun time, we were in unknown territory, and encountering new challenges in creating a fair giveaway platform for everyone. It seemed like each week we implemented another set of features that helped to pave the way for the site you see today.

I was looking through my files, and I still have a screenshot from the very first draft of SG. At that time, I thought we could potentially run a giveaway every single day, but today we've come much further.

Today

Far beyond original expectation, we now average 1,000 gifts daily. We've had the pleasure to work with countless game developers, and helped to inspire other gifting communities and Steam groups. We've reached a number of milestones during the years, and we're now quickly approaching half of a million users, and 10 million dollars in received gifts. Looking at the database, we're also nearing 25 million comments, and 225 million giveaway entries!

This has come with some challenges though. With the fast growth of the site, we've experienced a number of issues with hosting and site performance. We've upgraded hardware a handful of times, moving from shared hosting to a VPS, to a dedicated server, and to our existing setup of separate web and database servers. Nonetheless, we're still plagued by slow load times during peak hours. A number of people have asked about donating towards the site recently, and although I appreciate the support, I don't want users to donate based on a promise. A promise for faster load times, bug fixes, new features, or better support. I don't want to go that route. You'll see a donation button appear on the site when I think we've reached our goals, but we're not there... yet.

Tomorrow

Time for the most exciting part of this announcement, the part I've been waiting to post for well over a year. We've been working on a new site. That site is SteamGifts, a rebuild of the existing site to bring about a number of long-awaited features. What's new? In short, everything. The code has been rewritten, front and back. The database has been restructured for improved performance. The layout has been completely redesigned.

Due to the magnitude of the change, we're going to be going through a beta testing phase. We'll be testing the new site on a separate domain, with the return of an invitation system. As much as I'd like to flip a switch and surprise you with SGv2 tomorrow, I think community feedback is an important step. The new site is fairly polished thanks to feedback from our staff, and although there are a few little quirks, it's ready for users. The first round of invites will be going out on Saturday, the 25th. Once the testing is complete in the coming weeks, we'll be transferring all of the existing data from SG over to the new database, and relaunching SteamGifts.com.

Update: We've distributed two rounds of invites so far, and are continuing to implement suggestions and bug fixes. I'll unsticky this for now, and update again when we're close to launching.